light a new world made possible by science.
It fell to Einstein to explain cosmic rays. He was
instructed to keep it to five minutes. Initially he
refused. That wouldn’t possibly be enough time to
explain this mysterious phenomenon. But he was a
true believer in the scientist’s duty to communicate
with the public. And so he agreed.
As the sun was setting, Einstein stepped to the
microphone. He had just turned 60 and had enjoyed
decades of the rarest form of iconic celebrity, a
renown based on his discoveries of new physical
realities on the grandest possible scale. Those who
stood there in the rain to hear him were only a frac-
tion of those who listened to the event on radio.
“If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly
and fully,” he began, “its achievements must enter
not only superficially but with their inner meaning
into the consciousness of people.”
When I discovered Einstein’s rarely quoted words,
I found the credo for 40 years of my life’s work. This
always has been and always will be the dream of Cos-
mos. Einstein was urging us to tear down the walls
around science that have excluded and intimidated
so many of us—to translate scientific insights from
the technical jargon of its priesthood into the spo-
ken language shared by us all, so that we may take
these insights to heart and be changed by a personal
encounter with the wonders they reveal.
We didn’t know that particular Einstein quote
when Carl Sagan and I began writing the original
Cosmos with astronomer Steve Soter. We just felt a
kind of evangelical urgency to share the awesome
power of science, to convey the spiritual uplift of
the universe it reveals, and to amplify the alarms
that Carl, Steve, and other scientists were sounding
about our impact on the planet. Cosmos gave voice
to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with
hope, with a sense of human self-esteem derived,
in part, from our successes in finding our way in the
universe and from the courage of those scientists
who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths.
The original award-winning television series and
book of 1980 were embraced by hundreds of millions
of people. The Library of Congress included the book
as one of 88 in an exhibition called “Books That
Shaped America.” So it was with a fair degree of fear
that I set out with Steve, a dozen years after Carl’s
death, to undertake Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey.
Now on my third series of voyages on the Ship of the
Imagination, I once again have brilliant collabora-
tors, and I am still worried about not measuring up.
Despite this, the times impel me forward.
We all feel the chill our present casts on our future.
Some part of us knows that we must awaken to action
or doom our children to dangers and hardships we
ourselves have never had to face. How do we rouse
ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate
or nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed
before it has destroyed us and countless other spe-
cies? How do we learn to value those things we cannot
Writer-director-producer Ann Druyan was cre-
ative director of NASA’s Voyager message project
that sent sounds and images into space on golden
disks. This essay is drawn from her new book, Cos-
mos: Possible Worlds. Druyan has won Emmy and
Peabody Awards for her contributions to National
Geographic’s renowned television series Cosmos.live without—air, water, the sustaining fabric of life
on Earth, the future—more than we prize money and
short-term convenience? Nothing less than a global
spiritual awakening can transform us.
Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence,
to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully
alive. Love asks us to get beyond our personal hopes
and fears, to embrace another’s reality. This is pre-
cisely the way science loves nature. This lack of a final
destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science
such a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It
is a never-ending lesson in humility. The vastness
of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the
vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant.
What’s real must matter more to us than what we
wish to believe. But how do we tell the difference?
I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that
prevent us from having a complete experience of
nature. Here it is, the basic rules of the road for sci-
ence: Test ideas by experiment and observation.
Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones
that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And
question everything, including authority.
If pilgrimages toward understanding our circum-
stances in the universe, the origin of life, and the
laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t
know what could be. I’m not a scientist, just a hunter-
gatherer of stories. The ones I treasure most are
about the searchers who have helped us find our
way in the great dark ocean and the islands of light
they left to us.
The misuse of science endangers our civiliza-
tion, but science also has redemptive powers. It
can cleanse a planetary atmosphere overburdened
with carbon dioxide. It can set life free to neutralize
the toxins that we have scattered so carelessly. Its
unrivaled powers of prophecy are demonstrated by
our current predicament.
The words Einstein spoke on that rainy night
might prove to be among his most important gifts
to us. If we take what the scientists are telling us to
heart, a conscious and motivated public can will this
possible world into existence. jCreated and executive produced by Ann Druyan
and hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson,
the third season of the series Cosmos: Possible
Worlds transports viewers across space and time
with animations, holograms, and reenactments
of world-altering discoveries. The series pre-
mieres March 9 on National Geographic.Wa t c h Cosmos: Possible Worlds
MARCH 2020 19